I'm Pete du Pont with the National Center for Policy Analysis. It was with sad acceptance I noted Beijing's choice as the host city for the 2008 Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee put its blinders on and bought the fiction that sports is apolitical.
It isn't, of course. What if Johannesburg had been awarded the games in, say, 1964? What would the world outcry have been? "Heavens, we can't go there!" but the human rights crowd is notoriously one-sided. When it came to Moscow in 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, only Jimmy Carter had the guts to pull his country out. Carter showed a lot of political courage.
Sending our athletes to Beijing means saying the Chinese Communists are just like us, despite their quaint habits of throttling free speech and murdering dissidents. And if you don't think they'll mine it for all its political worth, I refer you to Adolf Hitler and the 1936 Nuremburg games.
Maybe the next Olympics should be in, say Cuba. Shouldn't we show Castro how fair we can be?
Those are my ideas, and at the NCPA we know that ideas can change the world. I'm Pete du Pont. Next time the folly of price controls.